Gary Bauer

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT GARY BAUER - PAGE 5

Leave it to gentle Iowans to sweetly swindle a few million bucks out of the Washington political pros. If there's anything to be learned from the Iowa Straw Poll for Republican presidential candidates held last weekend in Ames, it's that the pros will have to spend more millions in Iowa before the February caucuses there because the Republican nomination is not quite yet a foregone conclusion. That's good for the GOP. That's good even for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, although he may not see it that way right now. The Iowa Straw Poll is such a charmingly tricked-up affair--Votes for sale!

As he visited the state with the earliest primary, Sen. John McCain of Arizona said Saturday that he is within two weeks of deciding whether to seek the Republican nomination for president. The war hero formed an exploratory committee Dec. 29, allowing him to raise money. In New Hampshire, he met with about 70 party activists. "If John decides to go, then we can put together a very substantial organization, which I can now see will not be very hard to do," said former Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, who is co-chairman of McCain's exploratory committee.

President Clinton's nominee for surgeon general faced a new problem Friday: A conservative group charged that he may have condoned a government experiment in which more than 400 black men were denied treatment for syphilis. The allegation was immediately rejected by the White House, which had been quietly investigating rumors linking its nominee, Dr. Henry Foster, with the notorious 40-year experiment. And Foster, in a statement released by the White House, categorically denied that he went along with or even knew about the secret syphilis experiments before they were made public in 1972 and subsequently halted.

Federal health officials, in a confidential new report, have recommended a major increase in voluntary testing for infection with the AIDS virus. But they rejected increased mandatory testing and called for strong new laws to protect the secrecy of test results and the civil rights of people infected. The proposals, in a report by the federal Centers for Disease Control, dramatize a deepening rift in the administration over the role of the tests in the fight against AIDS. Proponents of increased mandatory testing, including Education Secretary William Bennett and Gary Bauer, a top White House aide, have become more vocal and impatient, citing a need for more detailed and comprehensive data on the spread of the virus and the health threat it poses.

The wife of disabled White House Press Secretary Jim Brady expressed indignation Wednesday over a federal adviser's statement that Mrs. Brady said slighted handicapped people. Eileen Gardner, who joined the Education Department this week, wrote in a 1983 draft report about the handicapped, "a person's external circumstances fit his level of inner spiritual development." Education Secretary William Bennett, responding to criticism of the report and another new adviser's statement earlier Wednesday, reaffirmed his "whole-hearted commitment" to the disabled.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Conservative activists picked Senator Rand Paul on Saturday as their preferred presidential nominee for 2016, in an early but often unreliable snapshot of the Republican Party's base. The Kentucky lawmaker, whose father, former U.S. Representative Ron Paul, ran for president three times, topped the annual straw poll taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Paul captured 25 percent of the vote, narrowly beating out Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who earned 23 percent.

They may have attended Ivy League schools and practiced law and medicine, but on the road, no task is beneath a candidate in search of votes. The mundane, absurd and even degrading duties of the campaign trail are all designed to capture the attention of the electorate. Occasionally, they can be deeds that are, er, downright unpresidential. "You want to create a picture where people can say: Here is an ordinary person," said Audrey Haynes, who teaches at the University of Georgia.

Former Sen. Bill Bradley held a slight fundraising lead over Vice President Al Gore over the last three months, with both Democrats taking in more than $7 million during the period. "This contest has tightened up, in the polls and in the money," said Larry Makinson of the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. Republican front-runner George W. Bush continued to surpass the rest of the fundraising field, taking in $20.2 million. Bradley had more money in the bank at the end of September than Gore did, $10.7 million to $10.3 million.

`I will soon be voting in my first presidential election. . . . If this is the best that my parents' generation has to offer, then something must be wrong with the process. Perhaps the fault lies in the fact that the best-qualified candidates are those individuals managing the private sector, where they have more money and less scrutiny to deal with.' -- James Riley, of Elmhurst, in a letter to the editor. NIGHTCLUB OWNER GARY BAUER, ON WHY HE PAID $2,700 FOR THE TOILET FROM ART MODELL'S FORMER OFFICE IN CLEVELAND STADIUM: `I just wanted to see where he made all his bad business decisions.

If ever there was a forceful argument for the merit selection of judges, Circuit Court Judge Susan McDunn is it. Not because she is so good at her job, but because she is so alarmingly bad at it. McDunn's actions in two recent adoption cases were so disrespectful of the law that a three-judge appeals panel took the remarkable step of apologizing to the families involved and said she had discredited "not only the judiciary, but the citizens of...